She nodded. "I guess there's a good deal to be said on Cy's side," she murmured after a little, her hands working and her voice not steady.
Ted grunted something disdainful, then muttered: "He played things up for all they were worth. Don't you think he ever missed anything!"
"Was that why Cy left town, Ted?" Ruth asked, speaking all the while in that low, strange voice.
"Oh, he claims so," scoffed Ted. "But he can't make me believe any family humiliation would have made him leave town if he hadn't had a better thing somewhere else. But of course he says that. That it was too hard for him and Louise! Too bad about that little doll-face, isn't it?"
Ruth made a gesture of remonstrance, but the boyish partisanship brought the tears she had until then been able to hold back.
Ted rose. And then he hesitated, as if not wanting to leave it like this. "Well, Ruth, I can tell you one thing," he said gently, a little bashfully; "with all Cy's grand talk about the wrong done mother and father, neither of them ever loved him the way they loved you."
"Oh, did they, Ted?" she cried, and all the held back feeling broke through, suffusing her. "They did?—in spite of everything? Tell me about that, Ted! Tell me about it!"
"Mother used to talk a lot to me," he said. "She was always coming into my room and talking to me about you."
"Oh, was she, Ted?" she cried again, feeling breaking over her face in waves. "She did talk about me? What did she say? Tell me!"
"Just little things, mostly. Telling about things you had said and done when you were a kid; remembering what you'd worn here and there—who you'd gone with. Oh,—you know; just little things.